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On the second afternoon, a woman from Sweden stood in the heat of Polichnitos, a village on the Greek island of Lesvos. A printed programme in hand, she was asking a stranger for directions to an open-air cinema inside a church.
She’d flown in for the movie and the exhbitions. She stayed for something nobody had sold her.
From three to five July, Polichnitos hosted the first edition of the Polichnitos Cultural Festival. Thirty artists from more than ten countries, across fishing workshops, open-air screenings, photography projected onto empty façades and abandoned buildings, walks through the salt pans, public conversations. Free entry to everything and one theme holding all of it together: Memories.
CREATED was there as strategic partner. Not the organiser, not the producer. We didn’t invent the festival and this piece isn’t going to pretend otherwise. It doubles as cultural diplomacy: a village and its visitors meeting with no agenda beyond memory. It’s about what three days of watching strangers fall for a village revealed about art, stories, and the kind of communication that only happens when people are in the same place.
How was the Polichnitos Cultural Festival born?
Dimitrios Koskeridis
Founder & Creative Director, CREATED, and co-founder of the Polichnitos Cultural Festival
“The idea came from a group of five people who come from the village, live there or have developed a strong personal relationship with this very unique place. For me, my family comes from Polichnitos, so launching a festival there, to honour the memories of the place and the people who kept it alive for centuries, meant something.
It was a cultural festival first. The objective was simple: bring art into a very small village in Greece, and into the life of the people who live there.
One of the founders, Ilir Tsouko, a filmmaker and journalist with a global reach. As artistic director, he managed to bring artists and professionals who thought the same way and built a programme that connects local stories, art and people. For three days, international artists and the locals met in the same streets, the same squares, had the same conversations. The natural resources, the architecture, the history, all of it became visible to people who had never heard of the place. And they met it with respect. For the tradition, for the biodiversity, for what this village has been.
Memories had to be the first theme. Remembering, and sharing what you remember, is close to what we do, as CREATED. And that’s why we took on the communication and the branding, and why we stayed with it afterwards as a sponsor.
That last part is unusual in events marketing: most agencies leave once the invoice is paid. CREATED stayed on as a sponsor after the branding work was done.”
How do you give life to local and rural stories?
Dimitrios Koskeridis: “Concept is the easy part. Translation is the work.
What we brought was the translation: giving these local stories a life, amplifying the art, putting rural memory into digital and in-person communication at the same time.
The brief we set ourselves was deliberately minimal. Fewer elements, more room for the programme and the people in it. Every piece of it was built the way the village was built. Piece by piece, with the place doing most of the talking.
We developed the branding out of lived experience. The smell of the sea. The angle of the local architecture. Terracotta red and olive green, pulled straight from brick and landscape. Like the logo, it’s connected to the past while still looking to the future. It’s something people locally can recognise themselves in, but it is very much global at the same time.
One of the designers who worked on this from the very beginning was Hector Chiarri, from Valencia. That was deliberate. We wanted an event anchored in the values and the place of Polichnitos, and still looking outward — so we brought as many international people onto the account as we could.
And then it stopped being ours. A lot of the ideas came from Ilir Tsouko as artistic director, from Nina Kapsali and Anja Troelenberg who curated the exhibitions, from Giorgos Gerakellis who developed our brand applications with our own Teodora, from Giorgos Koukoulas as festival director, from Giorgos Aggelopoulos, who held the relationships with the local population and ran the logistics on the ground with Nikos Kritikos, and many others, our very own people of the PCFL. This is the side of events marketing that never makes it into a case study: a list of names, not a slide of logos.”
What events marketing looks like without a media budget
Evangelos Michelinakis
Account Director, CREATED
“Ask most comms teams how they’d amplify a three-day event in a village most of Europe has never heard of, and you’ll get a familiar answer: paid reach, a press list, a hope that something gets picked up.
The PCFL worked differently. Artists acted as the festival’s ambassadors, spontaneously and organically. They shared the festival with their own communities and promoted the programme themselves. Its part of the industry, but we all felt that for the PCFL, people were communicating with their hearts. And once the artists arrived, they told their own followers what they were seeing, in their own words, as it happened.
That’s authentic communication. Spontaneous, coming from the heart, people describing how they feel while they’re still feeling it.
And it was an experience built on human interaction. As the festival progressed, people found photography exhibitions, fishing workshops, open-air cinemas, and public discussions with university lecturers and professors.
That’s what events marketing looks like without an ad budget to hide behind.”
How did you develop the website?
Teodora Todoran
Creative Media Specialist, CREATED
“For the website, we wanted something modern and easy to navigate, while still carrying that aesthetic of memory and age, and making sure the brand elements shine. Once the brand was developed, we translated it onto the site. Having a pool of old photographs taken in the village helped enormously: they carry the effect of old memories, of how people used to live, against the contrast of how we live now.
We made sure everything was easy to find and we also wanted to promote the village’s touristic side. On the ‘visit’ page we added the salt pans, the forests, the animals and birds you’ll find there. Making it easy for visitors to find things to do on the island.
The website’s minimalism is what elevates it. There’s nothing unnecessary. The fewer elements on the page, the more room for the people we worked with and the local events to come through. It lets the programme speak for itself. That was the vision.
The site still works as an events marketing asset months after the festival ended, ranking first on Google for ‘polichnitos festival’ and ‘polichnitos cultural festival.’
Why should organisations invest more in events marketing through cultural festivals?
Dimitrios Koskeridis: “NGOs and companies spend an extraordinary amount trying to be seen. Fighting the algorithm. Hoping it decides, today, to show them to someone new.
A festival doesn’t play that game. You don’t need permission to stand in front of a new audience. You show up, in person, for three days.
We’ve written before about why so much marketing aimed at younger audiences falls flat. It gets treated as a format problem, when what’s actually being tested is whether an organisation’s stated values survive contact with reality. A cultural festival is one of the cleanest versions of that test I know.
And it works! Look at what followed the festival. The account didn’t exist in April. By the end of July: 1,115 followers, 477,910 views, 60,686 accounts reached, 11,915 interactions. Nearly 60% of those views came from people who don’t follow the account — meaning the reach went outward, to strangers, not round in a circle among people already convinced. A third of the audience sits outside Greece. Germany, Italy, Turkey, Belgium. And 72% of it is between 25 and 44, which is the demographic that funds things, buys things and decides things.
The same three days also ran on national television, Star TV, and Alpha TV, on ERT, News, on Protothema, News247, on elCulture, travel.gr and across every regional outlet in the North Aegean. Alpha carried it ten days after the closing night, in the news section, not the culture listings. Star channel, a national station, played images on the main evening news. The festival ran under the auspices of the Municipality of West Lesvos, the Region of the North Aegean and Europe Direct North Aegean, with support from the General Secretariat for the Aegean and Island Policy, the Goethe-Institut and the Heinrich Böll Foundation.
Look at where the agency name sits in all of that. It sits in the organising line of a press release that national editors chose to run whole. Not in an ad. That’s the argument for investing more in this, not less. It’s harder to organise than a content calendar. That difficulty is exactly what makes it credible when it works. It’s a rare kind of events marketing proof: unpaid, unprompted, and still running weeks after the festival closed.”
Selected coverage, first edition
The clearest proof of good events marketing shows up in coverage nobody paid for.
Alpha TV · ERT News · Protothema · News247 · CultureNow · elCulture · travel.gr · Photologio · cityportal · all4fun · Stonisi — preview · Stonisi — post-festival · Lesvosnews · Τα Νέα της Λέσβου · Aeolos TV · Πανόραμα Πολιχνίτου
Organised in partnership with CREATED Agency Brussels and the Cultural Association Ρίζες & Ορίζοντες, under the auspices of the Municipality of West Lesvos, the Region of the North Aegean and Europe Direct North Aegean, with the support of the General Secretariat for the Aegean and Island Policy, the Natural History Museum of the Lesvos Petrified Forest, the Goethe-Institut and the Heinrich Böll Foundation in Greece.
Branding, website and festival communication for the Polichnitos Cultural Festival by CREATED, Brussels.
Its true that most of our communication is digital now. What’s powerful about being part of a festival, or having a booth, is the in-person visibility that comes with it. You build a far stronger bond with an organisation you actually meet and talk to than you do from a newsletter or a liked post.
In a post-COVID world where we’re all trying to get back into the real world, we should spend a little less time on digital communication and a bit more time getting out there. Being part of a festival. Organising a booth. Creating a real interaction with the people you’re trying to reach.
Once you’ve made that contact, once there’s a relationship with someone who wants to support your NGO or buy what you make, you can build on it yourselves. That’s the kind of relationship that lasts.
